Monogamy may be a myth...
...but misogyny is alive and well. This article, by Natalie Angier no less, is supposedly about the fact that monogamy doesn't really exist in the animal kingdom. But for some reason, it can't stop insisting that prostitution is the same thing as general infidelity. Even animals trade favors for sex, so where's the harm? As if trading favors for
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I'm with you on the workers' rights front, and I'm glad we're starting to hear more from sex workers themselves, and from organizations of and for them.
But I also worry that workers' rights might be a red herring in this case. As you point out, cultural attitudes need to change in order for working conditions to improve. But in this case, I think it's more than that. It's not specific cultural attitudes that need to change so much as the root cause of those attitudes, which is patriarchy. And that's something we can't change without fundamentally and radically altering the basic ideological premise on which society operates. Talking about sex work in terms of workers' rights makes people think that if we solve that problem, the whole issue will be resolved, which I don't think is the case. Not that workers' rights isn't a good place to start, but sex workers are only going to be able to garner so many rights as long as we live in a society that values women for sex above all else while simultaneously dehumanizing them in the process of determining how that value is defined.
Amanda at Pandagon makes an excellent point about this:
I propose that the problem with prostitution is unique not because sex as a service is unique exactly. I think that the problem with legalization schemes is that prostitution is more, for the majority of the customers, about buying the opportunity to treat a woman like utter trash. In order for prostitution to be legal and yet still viable, the scheme either has to preserve the customer’s right to treat the prostitute like trash (which is why it works in Nevada, though it does the actual prostitutes little good), or an illegal side market of prostitution will flourish next to the legal one. In other words, if you have to be nice to the legal whores, a lot of johns will go to the illegal ones. Which is probably why Amsterdam got more, not less, child prostitution and trafficking when they legalized prostitution.
That’s why arguments about buying hamburgers, etc. are beside the point. I mean, it’s offensive to compare a person to a hamburger, but it’s also a distraction from the real issue. Prostitution is a unique labor market. Most labor markets, the value of the labor can be separated in some sense from the mistreatment of the workers. You hire someone to make widgets, and the struggles are over benefits, safety standards, etc., but at no point do the workers and the bosses struggle over whether or not widgets are to be made. But when degradation and harm are the work itself, struggling over labor standards becomes confusing.
I love the idea of sex work as a free choice. I mean, who doesn't want Inara's job? But I also suspect that it's an unattainable pipe dream. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to improve the imperfect reality that we're stuck with, but I just can't buy the idea that there's nothing inherently problematic with the oldest profession. I mean, we can envision a Platonic ideal of sex work, but if it's never existed on any statistically significant scale in reality, then I don't think it makes sense to say that there's nothing inherently fucked up about it.
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The one minor point I do want to make, though, is in regard to this:
I just can't buy the idea that there's nothing inherently problematic with the oldest profession. I mean, we can envision a Platonic ideal of sex work, but if it's never existed on any statistically significant scale in reality, then I don't think it makes sense to say that there's nothing inherently fucked up about it.
How much of what we're trying to attain, or even have attained in the past century, had ever previously existed on a statistically significant scale? Egalitarian relationships in marriages? Same-sex civil rights? I think if our argument for why it's hopeless is that it's never been done entirely right on a large scale before, then we need to give up on an awful lot of goals.
Someday down the road we should have this conversation in more detail, with time and coffee and no phones ringing.
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And I do agree that not being able to fix a problem completely is no reason to abandon the problem, which is why, as I said, I'm really glad that we're starting to hear from more sex workers themselves about what they want. I just get worried when people, and I'm not talking about you, act like because there are some examples of humane sex work, the larger problem has been solved. But I also think it's a major triumph that there are educated sex workers out there who aren't just victims of a patriarchal agenda. I do think sex work can exist outside patriarchy, I just think that the majority of it is hideously oppressive.
It's a very divisive issue, which means that people tend to view it in black & white terms, which is one of my pet peeves. And I think that either/or thinking is one thing that makes it such a divisive issue among feminists, which doesn't do anybody any good.
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It's a subject I really enjoy teasing apart and exploring; those of us who are feminists who are/have been involved in sex work spend a lot of time doing that, and I find it remarkably productive, actually. If you're interested, there are items tagged under "sex work" in my journal, including some general theorizing here and there about the tricky boundary issues in sex work, and my posts from back when I was doing phone sex and processing that are here, although more of those are about how it fit into my personal life than about the politics themselves. I'll make sure you're on my sexuality filter so you can see them. I wish I had a copy of the interview I did for Kelly when she was writing an article for $pread -- we really got into a lot of the issues about privilege and why it makes my experience so different from many people's (because of the fundamental control I had over it), and also about differences between phone sex and in-person work.
It's a very divisive issue, which means that people tend to view it in black & white terms, which is one of my pet peeves.
*nod* It's much too complicated for that, definitely. My experience is worlds away from that of a woman working in the brothels in Calcutta, for example, or even a street worker in Cleveland. However, one of the nice things I can report about my experience is that although our line was an "anything goes" line in terms of fantasy material, and I did wonder on going into it if it would negatively impact my perspective on men, it didn't do that at all. A few assholes, a few creeps, a lot of perfectly decent human beings seeking a specific experience and thanking me politely afterward. And the management gave me far more leeway on how I chose to deal with the assholes and creeps than I currently get on my helpdesk phone job. Control of the situation makes such a huge difference. The other part of the equation has to do with changing the world such that more clients recognize sex workers as specialist professionals, rather than absorbing and redistributing the slut-shaming and degradation and abuse of power differentials. And that does mean dismantling patriarchy, here and abroad, definitely, because those power imbalances and misogynist attitudes that feed the worst sides of sex work have to be addressed. In societies where women are seen as fundamentally disposable that's horrifyingly reflected in sex work, in marital rape, in all sorts of issues.
It frustrates me a great deal; I think I'd be extremely well-suited to in-person sex work of some types, and I think there's a substantial need for it, but society isn't to the point where I could do that in a way I'm happy with, and there are certain ways I'm not willing to compromise. A lot of that has to do with the illegality and the issues of closets and disempowerment that creates.
Well, this is all disjointed and rambly, since I've been writing a bit here and there between calls for at least the past hour. So I'll send now, and figure I'll actually coherently explain myself some other time when we can talk at more length.
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